« Bien, et maintenant que diriez-vous de déposer votre portefeuille dans cette enveloppe ? Vous n’en aurez besoin à aucun moment jusqu’à votre départ, et il sera plus en sécurité ici que dans votre chambre : comme vous avez pu le constater, votre porte n’a pas de verrou. » Je sais pour avoir lu à son sujet […]

Lorsque j’arrive dans la salle principale où va se dérouler le Tokkoh et qu’on m’y laisse seul, j’ai beau être préparé à une expérience hors du commun, le choc visuel est tel que je reste un moment sidéré ; tout va bien, tout va bien, dois-je me répéter, tu n’es pas en danger. Ceci n’est […]

I was wondering how it might feel to live within a jikkenchi as one of these people who go against the grain and rage against the dying of the light, these lone wolves and escaped horses. Is there space for them within the Yamagishi Society, where calm discussion is the norm, where nobody should ever […]

Alright, here we go… This is going to be a tough one. If you are not a sociologist or political science wonk, it might be a good idea to avert your eyes (although by doing so you’ll miss out on cute pictures of pigs, among other sublime contributions to the Art of Photography). One of […]

It all started with a successful poultry farm. According to jikkenchi lore, Yamagishi Miyuzo (1901-1961) started to imagine what an ideal human society would look like early in his life: free, egalitarian, leaderless, at one with nature, and most importantly—full of love and compassion and free of anger. Unsurprisingly, the socio-political context of Japan in […]

Joining the Yamagishi Association formally (meaning, deciding to come and live on a Yamagishi “jikkenchi” community) is a long and multi-step process, which starts with the tokkoh; one must then attend the two-week “kensan school”, in order to further ponder the questions raised during the first step, while working together with a group of people […]

The first and last time that Mr Sakuramoto travelled abroad was in 1976, to China, right after the death of Mao Zedong. And even that trip was organized by the Yamagishi association — he was already living on a jikkenchi at the time. Mr Kaneko, who works at the noodle factory, travels occasionally to Korea […]

This morning, I was harvesting spinach. All of a sudden, an 8-bit melody started floating through my brain, come straight from a time far, far away… I started slashing at the spinach in a frenzy, but alas! No gold coins hidden in the leaves. The moral is: never underestimate the power of a Nintendo product […]

Yesterday, during our lunch break, the genial Sakuramoto-san 桜本 took me and my Korean friends for a walk outside the jikkenchi. He is a 山城ファン — a “castle enthusiast,” and likes nothing best than to explore the sites where castles used to stand in days of yore, when the likes of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi […]